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Richard Stallman Criticizes Bitcoin, Touts a GNU Project Alternative (coindesk.com)
Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports CoinDesk:
To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and "for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a way to use it by now."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
Projects before Bitcoin were shut down; The 'Trustless' feature of Bitcoin is mandatory; A central server is only a 'single point of failure' and must be avoided at all price.
That's exactly why Bitcoin is doomed.
Following a linear projection of the last 10 years of qubit count we are looking at 2023 before quantum computers can run Shor's algorithm (and the variations thereof required for existing algorithms.) At that point the signature algorithms used to sign transactions have to be switched over to post-quantum algorithms. The issue there is that the BEST (smallest) post-quantum signature algorithms are ~31KB each, equating to 4-8TB of data accruing per year added to the blockchain over what it already has (based on existing yearly transaction rates and assuming zero new users, it only goes up from there.) Worse still, this can't just be patched into the algorithm, it has to be initiated at the level of every wallet individually. This means another 2-3 years to get everyone to switch over. So we're looking at 2020-2021 before the algorithms need to be in place and people need to start the cutover. It's basically 2019 now, that's 1 year remaining to not only get the community to decide on WHAT post-quantum algorithms to switch to, but get them written, get the code debugged, and have the code deployed so the cutover can begin. Meanwhile, nobody is even taking this issue seriously.
But wait, it gets worse. That 4-8TB/year of signatures means everyone won't have a copy of the blockchain locally. That means centralization, which gets back to why the community is ignoring the issue with their heads in the sand: they know damn well that post-quantum algorithms mean the end of Bitcoin, because they mean that from every practical standpoint there will need to be centralization. Decentralization is the only real selling point of a cryptocurrency (it's not backed by governments like fiat currencies, it's not backed by materials like gold, it's just backed by the notion that nobody can take it away or control it: but at least 1 of those cease to be true in a post-quantum world, the way the community is keeping their heads in the sand over this issue ensures both will be eventually.)
It seems as if GNU has been infected with NIH.
Have they heard the good news about Open Source? They can take someone else's code and build on it.